Certainly, because he felt that as President maintaining the Union was a central duty of his. Not because he liked slavery. That just gets distorted by Confederate apologists into “Lincoln wasn’t really against slavery” because even 150~ years later, the South is still making excuses for slavery and trying to justify it.
You waited over six weeks to wander into this thread to post a one line error?
Kentucky was a slave state.
Kentucky had a significant number of voters who formed their own government that declared secession.
Jefferson Davis was also born in Kentucky.
While it is probably more accurate to identify Kentucky as a “border state” than a Southern state, when identifying the places where presidents were born, referring to Kentucky as Southern is quite accurate enough.
Maybe by establishing a merchant beachead in Birmingham and sending in a brigade of McCormicks Reapers and win over the people one farm at a time and disrupt the slavery economy and cause institutional realignments.
If slavery had been based on wheat or corn, you might have gotten away with that. However, using a reaper to knock down a field of cotton would have left a pile of cotton plants in a jumble on the field that would have required more slaves to dig through the mess to find and extract the individual bolls to be harvested.
Mechanical cotton harvesters that were economically viable were not developed until the 1930s and did not go into mass production until the middle of WWII. (They also required the power and lighter weight of internal combustion engines, so neither the original horse-drawn reaper nor later steam powered devices would have worked.)
I don’t know if this was knel’s point but the southern states would have been better off, both economically and politically, is they had grown more crops like wheat and corn. The south used to have a pretty broad economic base. In addition to food crops, it grew cash crops like tobacco and indigo as well as cotton. But cotton was the most valuable crop so it became the King.
And that hurt the south because it may them dependent on a single source of income. They needed to grow and sell cotton in order to keep their economy running. Any break in the cotton chain and their entire economy would collapse. And as it turned out, the cotton chain was pretty vulnerable. When the CSA declared its independence it found it had a huge supply of cotton that it couldn’t sell, it couldn’t eat, and it couldn’t turn into anything useful for fighting a war.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, Europe developed new sources for cotton when the war interfered with its access to American cotton. So even if the CSA had managed to win the war, it would have failed as an independent nation because it would have had no source of revenue to keep it functioning.
Correct, I realized my mistake after I had posted that. I didnt think of just how fully cash crops dominated agriculture and ecomony there.
I guess a war against some other major enemy could’ve united north and south elites and interests for awhile and prevented a civil war, but without technological advancements or a restructuring of their cash crop economy and weakening of the slavery institution, the issue of slavery in the south would’ve been a constant rift probably leading to a civil war eventually.
I wonder what would have happened if the boll weevil had started decimating the south’s cotton crops in the 1830’s instead of the early 1900’s.